Wednesday, April 18, 2012

It
would be too cliched to say that life goes through stages. Shakespeare
did, poets elaborated the obvious and exaggerated the meaning. This, we
were taught by rote from secondary school. A lot of things happen in
this routine and every human being goes through it, lives and dies.

A vicious cycle.

When it comes to complications of romance, it has its own defined
everlasting flow diagram. Like a symbiotic creature, romance moves as a
part of life. Life exists because of it and it exists because of life.

We, animals with the sixth sense, are abundant in expectations. There
are no boundaries to that aspect of emotion and nobody has been able to
lay out the basic rules of expectation. What is too much of it or what
is too less of it? We will never get the answers.
Is growing old good or bad? Expectation also ages with us and we are never too sure if it is good or bad.

When 13 years old: We can’t look at this age as a mere number. It
sends alert signals to the parents and prestigious shots to the person
who has reached the number. The expectations begin from the external
appearance. There is an adrenaline rush when the prettiest or the cutest
looks at you. Like the chemical bonds of oxygen and hydrogen to make
the perfect structure of water, we want to be tagged only with the good
looking person. We attempt to look the best, dress the best or simply be
called ‘the best’. Call it infatuation or crush, we labelled them as
love.

When
16 years old: Career and crush converge at the common road (to think of
it, I wrote a perfect alliteration here). We are forced to focus on one
by every elder we encounter while thoughts deviate to another. Life
promises too much at this juncture and optimism is raised. We are trying
to win the best of both worlds. We think we are funny and tend to
assume that popularity is by doing many things at a time. We learn to
multitask and somehow manage to do excel in one or two things. With
chaos in oneself, this age is definitely not too sweet.

When
19 years old: We are actually bidding good bye to the adolescence. With
that, we are also bidding farewell to most crushes. At this age, we
make choices. The surprising fact is that, choices seem less than what
we began with. This age is critical when it comes to cupidism. We
seem to make intelligent decisions. Romance seem to make more sense
than what we thought. We seek for long term romance and understand that
strength lies in the mutual trust. Relationships are made and broken and
‘expectation bars’ are raised and lowered. This age is a period of
realisation that ‘love’ at 13 was dumb.

When 22 years old: Man has been able to solve all mysteries of deep
waters but never the expectations that arise out of a human being. At
this age, we want to look the best, have the best of career, take the
best decisions, look for a long term relationship and expect more and
more. Most of the problems start here. The best part of this particular
age is that we believe in love whole heartedly. We are not too stupid or
too intelligent to be in love. However, this age is the mother of all
expectations.

We cannot stop our ever growing and always changing expectations as
it is a part and parcel of human nature. But maturity does teach us to
strike realistic views with the unrealistic expectations. Learn, adjust,
understand and reason out. After all, compromising is not always a bad
thing!